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Authors: Richard Brookhiser
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with each other, and their enumerations do not add up. “These writers,” Paine wrote, “may do well enough for bible-makers, but not for anything where truth andexactness is necessary.” The four gospel accounts of Jesus’ ancestry, crucifixion, and resurrection differ on points large and small. If the authors had given such inconsistent evidence in court, said Paine, “they would have been in danger of having their ears cropped for perjury, and would havejustly deserved it.” Paine was not the first man to notice these inconsistencies: Christian and anti-Christian polemicists had been explaining or deriding them for centuries. But Paine’s catalog of contradictions was well-tailored to impress or anger a nation of Bible-readers; it was literalism standing on its head.
Another characteristic line of attack for Paine was to arraign the Bible for indecency. He was ever on the lookout for naughty bits, andinviting his readers to snigger at them. He described Ruth wooing her future husband, Boaz, as a “country girl creeping slyly to bed” with him. “Pretty stuff indeed to be called theword of God!” He called the Song of Solomon “amorous and foolish,” Ecclesiastes the reflections “of aworn out debauchee.” He explained Mary Magdalene’s presence at Jesus’ empty tomb by her being “upon the stroll”—that is, trolling for tricks. The story of Jesus’ birth struck him as “blasphemously obscene. . . . Were any girl, that is now with child, to say, and even to swear to it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so,would she be believed?” Not by Paine.
Paine’s erotic history was as unhappy as Lincoln’s. He married twice, at ages twenty-two and thirty-four. His first wife died in childbirth after they had been together less than a year, and he separated from his second after three years, possibly for reason of impotence. There are no accounts of him having lovers. He liked arguing politics with the guys in coffeehouses and taverns. Nothing wrong with that; it was a common male pastime in all of Paine’s homelands. But sexuality, especially female sexuality, seems to have alarmed him, in the Bible as in life.
Violence in the Bible—Paine’s third target—disgusted him. Israel’s wars with its many enemies in the Old Testament struck him as “horrid . . . a military history of rapine and murder.” Claiming that God had ordered and approved this bloodshed was “blasphemy.” But what most rankled Paine was what had disturbed him at age seven or eight: the notion that Jesus, God’s Son, would offer Himself as a sacrifice in payment for man’s sins, and that God, His Father, would accept it. It seemed both irrational—Wasn’t God powerful enough to pardon sins without such a transaction?—and sadistic—How could crucifying an innocent man benefit others? “The Christian story of God the Father putting his son to death . . . cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse, as if mankind could be improved by theexample of murder.”
Paine’s alternative to Christianity was a religion of reason (hence the title of his book). God’s word was to be found not in any scripture, but increation itself; the way to read it was by using our reason—“the choicest gift ofGod to man.” Applying our minds to the world around us would show us how the universe worked, and how we should behave. Paine’s God says, “I have made an earth for man to dwell upon. . . . LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, TO BE KINDTO EACH OTHER.” Paine, though he would not capitalize the “b” of “Bible,” capitalized this sentence.
The Age of Reason defied everything Lincoln had been taught about religion as a child. Thomas Lincoln belonged to the Baptist church, which was growing rapidly in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America; he had joined a congregation in Indiana and had even served
Another characteristic line of attack for Paine was to arraign the Bible for indecency. He was ever on the lookout for naughty bits, andinviting his readers to snigger at them. He described Ruth wooing her future husband, Boaz, as a “country girl creeping slyly to bed” with him. “Pretty stuff indeed to be called theword of God!” He called the Song of Solomon “amorous and foolish,” Ecclesiastes the reflections “of aworn out debauchee.” He explained Mary Magdalene’s presence at Jesus’ empty tomb by her being “upon the stroll”—that is, trolling for tricks. The story of Jesus’ birth struck him as “blasphemously obscene. . . . Were any girl, that is now with child, to say, and even to swear to it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so,would she be believed?” Not by Paine.
Paine’s erotic history was as unhappy as Lincoln’s. He married twice, at ages twenty-two and thirty-four. His first wife died in childbirth after they had been together less than a year, and he separated from his second after three years, possibly for reason of impotence. There are no accounts of him having lovers. He liked arguing politics with the guys in coffeehouses and taverns. Nothing wrong with that; it was a common male pastime in all of Paine’s homelands. But sexuality, especially female sexuality, seems to have alarmed him, in the Bible as in life.
Violence in the Bible—Paine’s third target—disgusted him. Israel’s wars with its many enemies in the Old Testament struck him as “horrid . . . a military history of rapine and murder.” Claiming that God had ordered and approved this bloodshed was “blasphemy.” But what most rankled Paine was what had disturbed him at age seven or eight: the notion that Jesus, God’s Son, would offer Himself as a sacrifice in payment for man’s sins, and that God, His Father, would accept it. It seemed both irrational—Wasn’t God powerful enough to pardon sins without such a transaction?—and sadistic—How could crucifying an innocent man benefit others? “The Christian story of God the Father putting his son to death . . . cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse, as if mankind could be improved by theexample of murder.”
Paine’s alternative to Christianity was a religion of reason (hence the title of his book). God’s word was to be found not in any scripture, but increation itself; the way to read it was by using our reason—“the choicest gift ofGod to man.” Applying our minds to the world around us would show us how the universe worked, and how we should behave. Paine’s God says, “I have made an earth for man to dwell upon. . . . LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, TO BE KINDTO EACH OTHER.” Paine, though he would not capitalize the “b” of “Bible,” capitalized this sentence.
The Age of Reason defied everything Lincoln had been taught about religion as a child. Thomas Lincoln belonged to the Baptist church, which was growing rapidly in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America; he had joined a congregation in Indiana and had even served
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